The demand for more sophisticated rubber and plastic products is ever increasing, making manufacturing processes more important than ever. There is a large diversity of materials involved but these industry sectors share many challenges, such as: 

• High energy consumption & operating expenses
• Aging machinery resulting in inefficient production processes with low throughput, waste, downtime and high maintenance costs
• Pressure to continuously improve product quality and performance demanded by end-users
• Demand for higher productivity with lower volumes
• Flexibility of machines to cater for evolving and more sophisticated products 
• Meeting increasingly stringent environmental regulations
• Maintaining power factor
• Ensuring a safe working environment

Nidec Drives are leaders in automating rubber and plastics manufacturing processes. Many product manufacturers, OEMs and system integrators rely on our products, automation expertise and services to improve production processes. We help our customers build reliable and high-performance machines or modernise existing outdated equipment to the latest technology.

Key benefits

We help support our customers by providing:

• Full motion control solutions, seamlessly integrating with 3^rd party components as required.
• Local engineering and aftersales support through our worldwide Drive Centre network.
• DC to AC retrofit and hydraulic replacement solutions that:
  • Improve throughput, reliability, energy efficiency and machine availability.
  • Reduce noise levels and maintenance.
• Highly accurate performance to meet shorter production cycle times and produce high quality finishes.
• Precision and repeatability in terms of performance, control and long-term reliability from machinery.
• Flexible solutions that handle multiple material recipes and complex products
• Reducing operational costs.
• Enhancing safety and providing environmentally sound solutions.

Typical applications

Applications include the production of raw materials, converting processes (e.g. compounding, extrusion, moulding or calendaring), product finishing and recycling. 

In the case of tyres, there are additional materials such as steel and fabric, with several component level production processes before the complex final building and curing techniques form the final product.

• Extruders
• Compounding
• Mixing
• Pullers
• Core pulling
• Slitters
• Dual-turret winders
• Feeders
• Heat sealers / perforators
• Re-spoolers
• Rotary knife
• Flying shear
• Injection moulding
• Blow moulding